Zenith of Desire: The Hollywood Incubus

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****

Whether audiences embrace such a restrained gothic thriller remains to be seen.

She told herself not to read those articles.

She always reads them anyway.

*The Others* rested on her shoulders.

It wasn’t a loud film. There were no explosions, no elaborate action set pieces, no larger-than-life hero riding in to save the day. It was quiet, patient and unsettling, asking audiences to lean into silence instead of spectacle.

She believed in it. She believed in Grace.

More than anything, she believed in Marvin. She believed in his script, in his impossible confidence... and in the promise he had sealed that night. The memory stole over her so suddenly that her fingers found her lips a soft smile touching. For a fleeting moment, the world around her faded away. Then reality quietly reclaimed her, and she slowly lowered her hand.

But belief didn’t guarantee ticket sales.

If *The Others* stumbled this weekend, Hollywood would not spend months searching for nuanced explanations. It never did.

It would reduce everything to a single sentence.

Nicole Kidman can’t open a picture.

That sentence terrified her more than any review.

Once that label settled over an actress, it followed her from office to office. Scripts stopped arriving first. Studio executives became hesitant. Meetings grew shorter.

Suddenly every leading role came with another condition.

Can Tom do it?

Would Tom consider producing?

Could Tom help package the project?

She had spent years proving she was more than half of Hollywood’s most photographed marriage.

She wanted directors to hire Nicole Kidman.

Not Tom Cruise’s wife.

Lately, even that certainty had begun to slip.

She couldn’t explain it. There had been no dramatic fight. No screaming match. Just an ever-growing distance between them. More separate schedules. More nights apart. More conversations interrupted by assistants, phones and flights.

Tom had always been ambitious.

So had she.

Once, those ambitions had run side by side.

Now they seemed to be pulling them in different directions.

And if her career faltered now...

She wasn’t sure he’d stop to pull her back with him.

That thought frightened her more than the opening weekend numbers ever could.

Nicole let out a slow breath. She had mentally played these scenarios so frequently that she was already aware of how Hollywood or Tom would judge it.

If the film opened softly, nobody would remember the praise.

They would remember the number.

Box office always spoke louder than reviews. She stood and wandered across the bedroom, barefoot against the polished floor.

The room was enormous. Beautiful. Perfectly arranged. It no longer felt lived in.

Tom had been home less and less. Even when he was, conversations seemed shorter than they used to be, replaced by schedules, assistants and phone calls that always seemed more urgent than dinner together.

Nothing dramatic. Nothing anyone could point to.

Just a hundred tiny distances that hadn’t existed a few years ago.

She caught herself staring at the empty side of the bed.

A strange thought crossed her mind. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d simply shared the bed or stayed in bed talking.

Work had always come first. Lately, it felt as though everything else did too.

She pressed her fingers against her temples.

The headache that had greeted her when she woke was beginning to settle behind her eyes.

”Where’s Tommy?”

Her voice carried through the room.

A moment later the housekeeper appeared in the doorway, dressed in the same immaculate cream uniform she always wore.

”Mr. Cruise left early this morning, Mrs. Cruise.”

Nicole frowned. ”So early?”

”Yes, ma’am.”

”What for? I thought he was off today.”

The woman hesitated for barely a second. ”I’m afraid I wasn’t told.”

Of course she wasn’t. Nicole gave a tired smile that never reached her eyes.

”Right... forget I asked.”

The housekeeper inclined her head and quietly withdrew.

The room felt even larger after she left. Nicole walked back to the table and looked once more at the newspaper.

Every review praised her performance.

Every article questioned the film’s commercial prospects.

She no longer knew which one mattered more.

Nicole drew the silk robe tighter around herself.

The morning was warm, yet she couldn’t shake the chill.

The house was beautiful. It was also the loneliest place she knew.

She had lived there for years, yet more and more it felt as though she were a guest walking through somebody else’s life. The staff were always polite. Impeccably so. They smiled, answered every request, and never once stepped out of line.

But something had changed.

They always seemed to know where Tom was before she did.

If he left early, they already knew. If his plans changed, they already knew.

She was always the last person to hear.

Nicole wasn’t naïve. She understood why.

Over the last few years, more and more of the household had quietly become connected to Scientology. It wasn’t something anyone openly discussed. It simply... happened. New faces arrived. Old ones disappeared. The atmosphere changed almost without her noticing.

Until one day she realised she was living in a house where nearly everyone belonged to the same world—

A world she never truly belonged to.

Her father had spent his life as a psychologist.

To Scientology, psychology wasn’t simply another profession.

It was the enemy.

She had heard enough whispered conversations, read enough articles, and endured enough uncomfortable meetings to understand exactly where that placed her.

Whether anyone said the words aloud no longer mattered.

She could feel it.

She wasn’t one of them.

She never would be.

Sometimes she caught herself wondering whether people were watching her or simply reporting what they saw.

They weren’t just staff; they were handlers from church. This suffocating situation made her both terribly anxious and fiercely angry.

And then, looming over everything like an invisible shadow, was the issue of the Church of Scientology.

It was the rigid, secretive belief system her husband was fanatically involved with.

She hated herself every time the thought crossed her mind.

Then something else would happen—

A conversation ending the moment she entered.

A meeting Tom forgot to mention.

Another weekend planned without her.

And the doubt returned.

Tom hadn’t always been like this.

When they first met, his ambition had been infectious. His energy filled every room. He chased impossible goals with the optimism of someone who genuinely believed tomorrow could always be better.

That was one of the reasons she’d fallen in love with him.

Now that same determination seemed to belong to someone else.

He was away more often.

His conversations had grown shorter.

Questions about Scientology usually ended with a smile that revealed nothing or an answer that somehow managed to answer nothing at all.

She had stopped asking. Not because she no longer cared.

Because she was tired of feeling as though every question built another wall between them.

Sometimes she lay awake beside him, listening to his breathing, wondering how two people could sleep inches apart and still feel separated by an ocean.

She didn’t know when that had happened.

Only that it had.

She looked around the enormous bedroom.

Everything was immaculate.

Everything was expensive.

Perfect silence.

It felt less like a home than a carefully maintained display.

Nicole had heard the whispers often enough.

Sometimes from former members who spoke in hushed voices, as though they still feared someone might be listening. Sometimes from the icy smiles and lingering looks of senior Church figures whenever she accompanied Tom to an event.

She knew they wanted her gone.

People like David Miscavige, that they were constantly, aggressively encouraging Tom to divorce her.

To them, she wasn’t simply Tom’s wife.

She was an obstacle.

A woman who didn’t belong. Suppressive Persons (SPs).

Someone they believed was pulling him away from the path L. Ron Hubbard chosen for him.

What unsettled her most wasn’t their hostility.

It was Tom’s response.

He never confronted them.

Never asked them to stop.

Instead, he spent more and more time behind closed doors, emerging from private meetings quieter than before, repeating thoughts that didn’t quite sound like his own, prioritizing their counsel over his own wife’s tears.

Whenever she tried to explain how isolated she felt, he would reassure her everything was fine.

That she was imagining things.

That the Church only wanted what was best for them.

Eventually, she stopped arguing.

She wasn’t sure whether Tom couldn’t see what was happening...

Or simply no longer wanted to.

The uncertainty frightened her more than certainty ever could.

A part of her felt a certainty that her husband had been completely brainwashed.

Some days, she looked around their beautiful house and felt like a songbird locked inside an exquisitely crafted golden cage.

It was still a cage.

For a reckless moment, another memory surfaced.

A quiet night.

A conversation that had gone on much longer than either of them intended.

Marvin.

She remembered the way he’d listened instead of waiting to speak.

The ease she had felt around him.

And the moment she’d almost crossed a line she had spent every day since pretending hadn’t existed.

She had stopped it.

She knew she had done the right thing.

So why did she keep thinking about it?

Why did that unfinished moment return on the nights when the house felt empty despite being full of people?

Nicole shut her eyes.

No.

She wasn’t going to think about that.

Not today.

Today she only needed one thing.

She needed *The Others* to succeed.

Because if it didn’t...

She wasn’t sure what part of her life would begin falling apart first—

Her career...

Or the marriage she could already feel slipping through her fingers.

....

...

..

.

Nicole knew no one inside that house would ever give her a straight answer.

Not anymore.

The staff were courteous. Efficient. Invisible when they needed to be.

And completely loyal to Tom.

Or perhaps not even to Tom.

To the Church.

She couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.

After forcing herself through a breakfast she barely tasted, she pushed the plate away.

”I’m going out.”

Twenty minutes later the car was carrying her into Beverly Hills.

She hadn’t chosen the café because it served the best coffee.

She had chosen it because reporters rarely got inside.

Pat Kingsley was already waiting in the quietest corner of the room.

Nicole slid into the chair opposite her and didn’t bother with pleasantries.

”Do you know where Tommy really is?”

Pat studied her for a moment before answering.

”He had a meeting at Paramount.”

Nicole waited.

”With Sherry Lansing. Mission: Impossible 2.”

Nicole let out a humourless laugh. ”So production meetings have started... And nobody thought to mention it to me.”

She looked down at her untouched coffee. ”I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.”

Pat said nothing.

She had learned long ago that Nicole often needed silence more than advice.

Nicole rubbed the side of her cup with her thumb. ”I bet he just went to fuck that old bitch again—” Nicole stopped mid-sentence, the crude words tasting like ash. She smiled bitterly, exhaustion evident in the fine lines around her eyes. ”I’m sorry. That was beneath me. You know there was a time,” she said quietly, ”when he’d come home excited about a script. We’d stay up half the night talking about it.”

A faint smile appeared. ”I usually had terrible ideas.”

Pat smiled. ”I doubt that.”

”Oh, I did.” Nicole laughed softly. ”He’d tell me they were brilliant anyway.”

The smile disappeared almost as quickly as it came.

”I can’t remember the last time he told me anything first.”

She looked out through the café window.

”Lately I hear about my own husband through assistants... producers... sometimes even reporters.”

Her voice remained calm.

That worried Pat more than if she’d started crying.

”I don’t know where I fit anymore.”

Pat folded her hands.

”You’ve both been under extraordinary pressure.”

Nicole looked back at her.

”Pressure doesn’t explain this.”

”No.”

”It feels...” She searched for the word. ”Organised.”

Pat didn’t interrupt.

Nicole lowered her voice. ”The house doesn’t feel like my home anymore.”

She hesitated. ”I recognise fewer faces every week.”

”The people around Tom...”

”They all seem to belong to the same world.”

Pat knew exactly what she meant.

Scientology had become impossible to separate from Tom’s daily life. Meetings, advisers, friends, staff—year after year its presence had grown until it touched nearly every part of his routine.

Nicole had never managed to become part of that circle.

She wasn’t expected to. She was expected to adapt to it.

”My father spent his life as a psychologist,” Nicole said quietly. ”I knew from the beginning that wasn’t exactly... welcomed.”

****

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